A Doubter's Almanac (9 page)

When they reached Albert Lea a lazy snow was filtering down. They turned west, then south onto 60 at Worthington, the clouds breaking up finally near Sioux City, where they came out onto the Missouri River under a clear sky at nightfall.

A huge barge lit from bow to stern was making its way up the dark waterway. “Our own private constellation,” he said.

“Floating toward us through the heavens.”

They got out of the car and stared. She cradled herself in the crook of his shoulder. They must have stood there for an hour in the windless night, silently watching as the lights moved up the river past them. Then the landscape turned black again. It might have been the happiest hour he’d ever spent.

Onward. It was twenty-five degrees out, and after a dinner of Ritz crackers and a can of Spam from a country gas station, they spent the night on a side road near Onawa, curled around each other in the backseat beneath their coats and a wool blanket that he’d found folded around a tin of chocolate bars in the trunk. In the morning she nudged him awake. She pointed through the gap she’d rubbed in the frost: a herd of elk was filing slowly past the car.

“It’s a sign,” she said. “Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For picking me up. You seem to have figured out what a girl wants.”

“I have?”

“Some of it, at least. I guess you’re actually not an idiot. Not a complete one, anyway.”

In the rising light they ate the chocolate bars and stepped a few yards from the car to drink from a shallow stream whose icy coat he broke with the heel of his boot. At midday, near Ogallala, she pulled a tiny bottle from her bag. She split its contents between the two Styrofoam coffee cups that had been rolling around on the floor since their gas-station stop the night before and offered one across the seat.

“What is it?” he said.

“Irish coffee.”

“Where’s the coffee?”

“Already in our stomachs.”

He kept one hand on the wheel as he sipped. It was Tennessee whiskey. The feeling he had then, with the empty road rolling ahead of them through the white fields and the warmth of the liquor easing through his veins—it cracked open the world. Near Julesburg he turned to look at her and found her gazing back at him, her lips not quite closed.

“That was your present,” she said.

“What was?”

She held up the cup.

He steered them off at the next exit and on a dirt road behind a farmer’s field left the engine running. She slid over on top of him, but when he tried to enter her she pushed him aside and rolled to the passenger seat. She dropped the backrest and pulled his hand between her legs. He moved over onto her, but she pushed him away. “Kiss me like you mean it,” she said. She rubbed her mouth against him. “Go slow.”

He did. Warm air blasted from the heaters. She placed her hand over his, pushed it down between her legs, and showed him. She began to sigh. She lifted his other hand onto her breasts. She spread her legs wide and guided down his head. She was whispering. She arched her back, shivered, and pulled him over on top of her.

On they drove. Just east of the Wyoming border they stopped to eat. At an insanely bright truck stop they shared an order of barley soup under the gaze of a sturdy middle-aged waitress who returned with a full plate of warm bread and set it down next to their bowl. What they couldn’t finish they slid into their pockets.

When they were done eating, he gave Cle the car keys and walked back to use the bathroom. He washed at the sink and in the chipped mirror examined his face. His features had never pleased him, and he looked no different now except for the unusually dark beginnings of a beard. His forehead was still too broad, his entire face far softer than he wished it.

Still, he’d changed again. He could sense it.

When he got back out to the car, the trunk was open and she was in the front seat with the burlap sack on her lap.

“My
God,
” she said. “What
is
this?”

“A chain.” He closed the trunk and went around to take his place at the wheel. “What does it look like?”

“My God, Milo. Where’d you get something like this?”

“I made it.”

“You
made
it?”

“Yes.”

“With your own hands?”

“Yes.”

“It must have taken years.”

“A couple of months.”

“And it’s all wood?”

“Yes.”

“Here,” she said, “let me see those hands.” She reached across the seat and took them. She rubbed the skin on his palms, touched each squarish yellow callus, ran her nails up between the indented joints that beneath her ministrations presented themselves to him as though for the first time; sitting there with her, he saw his fingers not just as straight, utile extensions of his will but as the varied isthmuses of form that they actually were, narrowing and widening, hiding and exhibiting their wrinkles. In the pearly light of the High Plains afternoon she brought them one at a time to her lips and kissed them. Then she lifted both his hands and for a long moment held them there against her cheeks.

At last she let them drop and he started the car and drove them on toward California.

Devil’s Fork

B
ACK IN
B
ERKELEY,
he took his usual seat at Evans Library and looked down at the stack of journals whose tables of contents had long ago become litanies of worry for him. In any week, there were at least a dozen publications that might arrive with someone else’s breakthrough on the Malosz.

He placed his arm over the cover of
Acta Mathematica
and for a few minutes tried to focus his mind. Finally he gave in and opened to the first page. Fortunately, there was nothing there to upset him, as there wasn’t in any of the rest of the pile. He set it all aside.

His habit then was to close his eyes. He had a particular gift for logical cartography and all his life had been able to leave his thoughts whenever he broke for the night and then return to them the next day at the exact location where he’d quit, as though his internal mappings—in his mind, he was currently unfolding three-dimensional knots and refolding them antichirally—were an illustrated book in which he’d simply turned down the corner of a page.

But this time something different occurred. A darting little flicker on the screen of his cognition. For several moments he couldn’t resummon the previous night’s picture. The blankness lasted almost no time at all.

He’d been getting too little sleep.

—

O
NE NIGHT IN
a deadening rain, Biettermann offered him a lift home from the mathematics building. Just the two of them this time in the rumbling old GTO, red taillights wobbling against the slick asphalt all the way up College Avenue. The car slid between lanes, moving headlong through traffic. Horns faded behind them.

“Can’t you get this thing to go any faster?” said Milo.

Biettermann snorted.

Biettermann made him edgy but in truth there was something he liked about him, too. The long hair straggling over such eager eyes. Want played on Earl’s features the way it played on an animal’s. He was leaning up close to the windshield, one hand on the wheel, the other drumming the shifter. The brainy people that Milo knew—he remembered Earl’s perfect calculus exam—didn’t behave like the guy next to him. They didn’t drive as though a checkered flag had been dropped. The tires screeched, and the GTO shot through a gap in the traffic; then they were out in front, racing south toward Oakland, the wipers revealing an astigmatic world in brief half circles of clarity.

“I was kidding about faster,” Milo said. “Maybe be a little careful.”

“I know you were kidding, man. I laughed.”

At a red light in front of the new BART station, the rain was slackening, the wipers painting ever-renewing Venn sets onto the glass.

“Actually, Andret,” Biettermann said, “you’re the one who should be careful.”

“Me? Of what?”

“Of
her
.”

They peeled out again.

“You’re talking about Cle.”

“I am.”

“I am completely careful with her, Earl.”

“I don’t mean it like that.”

“Then how do you mean it?”

They caught another red. This far south, the streets were quieter, the wipers squeaking against the glass. Earl looked straight ahead. “Not careful
with
her, Milo. Careful
of
her.”

“What are you talking about?”

“She’s dangerous, my friend.”

“All right.”

“Me,” Biettermann said, “I
like
dangerous.” He turned now and regarded Milo, not unsympathetically. “But
you
don’t.”

“You’re right, Earl. I don’t.”

When the light changed, Earl pulled away more reasonably. At Milo’s corner, he said, “And why’s that?”

“And why’s what?”

“Why don’t you like dangerous? What are you afraid of?”

It was an interesting question, the kind of question mathematicians enjoyed posing to one another: an inquiry into the apparently obvious. Milo thought about it. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’d have to think about it.”

In front of his building they shook hands—the soul shake again—and Milo slid out into the drizzle. As he unlocked the apartment door he heard the squeal of the GTO. In the chilly basement, he set down his things, then put on water for tea and called her. No answer. When the water boiled, he added a finger of whiskey and set the cup on the night table. Then he called again. Still no answer.

Lying under the covers as the rain ticked against the windows, he thought about Earl’s question. In every single drop on the glass he could see the incrementally rotated orb of the solitary streetlight that was shining down from the post across the way. This in itself was a puzzle. The world, if you let yourself consider it, was a puzzle in every plane of focus. Why
was
he so afraid of it?

Then the corollary: Why
did
he want to live?

Shortly before sleep, the answer came, at least to the corollary: he wanted to live so that he could solve a great problem.

—

O
NE DAY, HE
was in a teahouse with Cle when Biettermann walked in and gave her a kiss. This time, she didn’t deflect it. Then Biettermann sat down, and the three of them spent the morning chatting in the cramped chairs. From next door, old Jefferson Airplane vibrated the table. Biettermann nodded his chin to the beat, his hair bouncing over his eyes. “The pleasure we get from counting,” he mumbled, “without knowing we’re counting.”

“What’s that?” said Cle.

He glanced up. “Music.”

She laughed.

Milo shook his head. “Leibniz said that, Earl.”

“Indeed he did, my friend. Indeed he did.” He nodded at Milo. “Round one to you, I guess.”

Milo looked away.

For the rest of the morning, they sat in the rattan chairs talking about nothing. It was an activity Milo despised, but he wasn’t about to leave. At one point, Biettermann used an unfamiliar word. Then a few minutes later, just before he finally left for a class, he used it again.

As soon as he was gone, Milo said, “What the hell did that mean?”

“What did what mean?” said Cle.

“That pompous little word he kept bringing out.”

“Entheogen?”

He wrote it on a napkin.

“Look it up, Andret.” She winked at him.

“All right, I will.”

“Wait a second,” she said, leaning closer. “Wait a minute—that bothered you, too, didn’t it? Not to know a word that
he
knew.”

“I’m interested in knowledge.”

“Of course you are.”

Silence.

Now she was smiling. “And while you’re at it,” she said, “here’s another one for you.
Theodicy.
That’s another word Leibniz used. As long as you have the dictionary out, you might as well look ’em both up.” She sipped her tea. “He wrote a whole book about it, as a matter of fact.”

“All right,” he said. “I will. I like to learn.”

She leaned toward him, her hand grazing his leg. “By the way,” she said, “I like to learn, too.” She rubbed her lips along his cheek and stopped at his ear. “And in case you’re confused,” she whispered, “Earl’s got it backwards.
He’s
Leibniz.
You’re
Newton.”

—

T
HEN, ONE CHILLY
night in December, a night during which he’d been forced to sit at a different desk—the room he normally worked in was being recarpeted—he became aware, briefly, of the presence of something. Some force or even some being just behind him. A charge in the air. For a moment he had the sensation that a net was about to be tightened around his arms. He fought it. By an act of discipline he was able not to turn his head.

—

O
F COURSE THERE
was nothing there. But now and again the idea would materialize without warning—a feeling on his shoulders.

He refused to turn.

If he did, if he gave in to the urge, he saw nothing, of course. Just the blank rows of study carrels and the line of storefronts down Euclid, colored by lights. They stretched to vanishing in the darkness.

He would face forward again and close his eyes. For a change of scene, he’d begun spending time in the main library instead of Evans. Still, there could be other mathematics students around. If Milo Andret’s eyes were open, the other students would notice. Milo Andret worked with his eyes
closed
. He was Hans Borland’s protégé. The savant.

At this point he was usually done for the evening.

Occasionally he would drop all pretense and just walk over to one of the big windows and stare out toward the bay. The air from that direction smelled of fog and turned the streetlights into rows of yellow moons. Sometimes this was enough; but usually, he would need to leave. To calm himself he would take a longer route home. The couples with their dogs. The rows of wooden bungalows lit by porch lamps. The orange-rind scent of the trees. All of it gathered by the steady beat of his step. At the apartment he would go immediately to his notebook, which was dense now with figures. In such straightforward work he could forget himself.